María Ruido was born into a working-class family outside the art world. In La memoria interior, she turns to her family history to examine her parents’ experience as migrant labourers. The film explores the emigration from Spain to Germany in search of factory work, reflecting on what is remembered and what is forgotten. Starting from personal experience, it questions who gets to narrate histories of labour and challenges those memories that are shaped by institutions and often stripped of their political force. Ruido also examines her own role and responsibilities as an artist from a working-class family, exploring differences in forms of labour and their consequences.
“The work is the result of a trip to Germany and of a personal investigation that lasted several years, tackling the theme of the construction of memory and of the mechanisms of the production of history. Through the narration of my family’s history, it delves into the memory of the then recent emigration from the Spanish state to Europe, and the elaboration from personal experience against the idea of an official history and memory, restricted to the institutional and articulated around the deactivation of the political subjects.” (María Ruido)
